Both the West and Russia failed to preserve Kyiv’s vital buffer role. The consequences couldn’t be more dire.

(Originally published Feb. 28 in “What in the World“) Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday responded to Western financial sanctions and what he called “aggressive statements” by ordering Russia’s nuclear forces onto high alert, ratcheting up tensions in a war against Ukraine sparked by the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that he has cast as a broader battle against the United State’s “empire of lies.”

The U.S. and its NATO allies are now sending weapons to Ukraine, including fighter jets from the European Union and handheld, surface-to-air “Stinger” missiles for shooting down invading Russian aircraft. And on Saturday, the allies said they would remove some Russian banks from the SWIFT financial messaging system used for international financial transfers, with the U.S., the E.U. and Canada also blocking Russia’s central bank from using foreign-currency reserves deposited in their countries. Both moves are aimed at crippling Russia’s ability to conduct international trade and manage the value of its currency against others. While Russia has been moving in recent years to reduce the proportion of its reserves held in U.S. dollars, an estimated 40% of its $630 billion in reserves are held in North America and Europe.

Putin’s response to the sanctions is a signal that he may see them as the “interference” he warned when launching the invasion that could trigger “consequences you have never faced in your history.” The closer the sanctions come to damaging Russia’s economy and ability to pursue and maintain Putin’s security goals—and the closer they come to him personally—the more likely he is to see them as a threat to Russia’s (and his own) survival.

Whether or not it achieves victory in Ukraine, Russia’s invasion has already unified Europe around the new threat on its eastern border and touched off a renewed arms buildup. Germany announced over the weekend a dramatic and historic increase in defense spending, aimed at reversing decades of German military weakness, starting with a $113 billion defense outlay.

A confluence of factors informed Putin’s decision to invade. Putin has been trying to restore Russia’s Soviet-era greatness for many years—or at least arrest its decline. And as his efforts have grown bolder, the West has tolerated his moves against Georgia, Crimea and in Syria. In the meantime, the Russian military has been regaining the spit and polish lost after the fall of the Soviet Union. The West’s pathetic response to the pandemic and the rising political divisions between the allies and domestically clearly convinced Putin that his opponents were off-balance.

Putin isn’t the only one taking advantage of Western disarray. North Korea on Sunday launched a ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan, resuming a flurry of illegal testing it resumed in January.

But Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is also the culmination of NATO’s creeping eastward expansion over the past 30 years. The U.S. Navy is close to completing new missile bases in the former Soviet satellites of Poland and Romania that Russia views as a not-so-cloaked dagger pointed at Moscow. The former Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had already joined NATO, and after toppling its own pro-Russian government in 2014 Ukraine was eager to join both the EU and NATO.

Trends in global energy demand, particularly for Russia’s oil, play another role. As Bill Spindle writes in the latest installment of his newsletter “The Energy Adventure(r),” declining investment in oil and gas supply by the West as it shifts toward more sustainable energy has, for a moment, given oil-producing nations like Russia and the Gulf States a powerful opportunity to carve out the world they want to occupy when the sun finally sets on their petropower:

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are loudly touting plans to diversify their economies and overhaul their societies away from oil and gas, even as they aim to significantly ramp up oil production in the coming years to pay for this overhaul…

Putin’s mindset and talents lie with military force and raw power politics, not diversified trade and commerce. So he may have decided, as Arab Gulf states clearly have, that they are entering prime time, perhaps their last best chance to fortify their global position before the geopolitical landscape slowly shifts against them.

Oil wealth already made Putin inherently more aggressive, according to Professors Jessica L.P. Weeks from the University of Wisconsin and Jeff D. Colgan at Brown University. In an op-ed published by The Washington Post, the two note that petrostates like Russia, Iraq, Iran and Libya are 50% more conflict prone than their non-oil producing counterparts. If they also happen to be ruled by an autocrat like Putin, oil is an enabler for their bellicosity:

In the hands of an aggressive or revisionist leader like Putin, however, oil can further reduce domestic political constraints. Oil money allows an autocrat to buy off domestic opposition, build a military machine and create a war chest to ward off sanctions. In that sense, Putin is following in the footsteps of other petrostate dictators like Hussein and Moammar Gaddafi.

While Russia may inevitably succeed in turning Ukraine into a puppet state, the best outcome, as this newsletter has argued, is one former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger posited back in 2014—something akin to a Finlandization of Ukraine. Ukraine should remain a buffer between Russia and the West.

Russia must accept that to try to force Ukraine into a satellite status, and thereby move Russia’s borders again, would doom Moscow to repeat its history of self-fulfilling cycles of reciprocal pressures with Europe and the United States. The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country… Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then.